Preview: God of War III

Yesterday, our preview of Visceral’s Dante’s Inferno revealed that publisher Electronic Arts is going for the jugular in its competition with Sony’s God of War series, which has been the uncontested heavyweight champion of hack-and-slash games since the late PlayStation 2 era. So how is Sony responding to the move into its territory?

By producing more of the same. The God of War series has become massively successful following two PlayStation 2 games and a PSP title that were virtually identical, and Sony will stick to what works.

Fans, by now, know how the story goes. Our hero, Kratos, is on a quest for revenge against the gods of ancient Greece, and this naturally angers the gods to a great degree. In this chapter, the gods are busy infighting with the Titans (in Greek mythology, the super-gods who created the gods), and the result promises to be more epic than previous games in the series. In fact, Sony has taken to calling it “Titan gameplay,” meaning that entire levels will take place on the backs of the Titans themselves.

Such epic-ness wouldn’t be possible without the graphical horsepower of the PlayStation 3. God of War III, the first on Sony’s latest hardware,runs at a gorgeous 1080p and packs more detailed environments, and more enemies, than any of its predecessors. Sony claims there will be as many as 50 enemies on-screen at a time, though in our demo we never came across more than about ten at once. While it’s impossible to say it looks “better” or “worse” than Dante, both games look fantastic.

We were, thankfully, given a taste of the variety of weapons Kratos will wield. Depending on the weapon he holds, it affects his movement and animation, making each weapon effectively a new fighting stance. Naturally, new magical powers and items are par for the course, and our demo let us float Kratos around for a few seconds with the Wings of Icarus and stab the flying Harpies in order to fly between platforms. In all, there’s just a bit more depth to combat than Dante’s Inferno, but only the most discerning of hack-and-slash aficionados would appreciate the difference. That just serves to distract from the hacking and slashing, anyway.

Perhaps that’s the lesson to draw from both God of War and its new competitor. There’s only so much you can do to a hack-and-slash game before you ruin it. Soda makers don’t change the formula for their products every couple of years; why should a hack-and-slash developer?

The soda analogy has a point: God of War is Coke, and Dante’s Inferno is Pepsi. Each will have its fans on the Internet, but at the end of the day, if you can have one of these you won’t miss the other. Dante makes it to market first, some two months ahead of God of War. The battle for hack-and-slash king of the hill is so on.

God of War III will arrive exclusively on PlayStation 3 in March 2010.